Metals, Minerals, and Maps

In September, I wrote a post about arsenic maps of the United States, partly to compare the pattern of poison-tainted drinking water with the pattern of arsenic that swirls through the nation’s soils.

I was lucky enough to get the soil map from a very smart (and very generous) U.S. Geological Survey geochemist based in Denver named David Smith. It was part of a detailed mapping of the United States that USGS had been putting together since 2007. The maps were based on samples taken at almost 5,000 sites, looking not only at arsenic but everything from aluminum (shown above) to zinc. They paint a portrait of the 48 contiguous states in toxic elements ranging from arsenic to thallium, radioactive elements, dangerous metals such as lead, precious metals such as silver, elements from calcium to sodium that permeate the human diet.

This month all of the images and the underlying data went online and are available for free. The maps, I think, are beautiful, even those that detail the startling swirl of poisons through our environment, such as those shown in the arsenic map I mentioned earlier:

The data isn’t so fine that it will tell you what lies in your backyard behind the raspberry bush. But it will show you the metal and mineral patterns that color your part of the world and they will remind you – as they should – of the astonishing and diverse chemistry that the planet creates under our feet